Here's a tip if you spend most of your work day working at a computer, like most programmers do. It is a lot faster to use the keyboard than the mouse. The mouse slows you down. You have to interrupt yourself to reach over and it is slow and imprecise to use. Then you have to interrupt yourself again to get back to the keyboard.
You will be more productive if you learn the keyboard accelerator shortcuts for the programs you use heavily during the day. Any professionally written application has them. Many good applications allow them to be customized so you can create a binding for a command you use a lot that takes three menu clicks to invoke with the mouse. The keyboard shortcuts will just save you tons of time if you learn and master them. It is a small investment in time that will pay off many times over.
I find it surprising at work how few people realize the benefit to using the keyboard over the mouse. As programmers we write the applications so should want to make them fast and easy to work with to test, yet a lot of people don't.
One time a couple of years ago a co-worker was struggling and using his mouse awkwardly with his left hand. I said to him, "I thought you were right handed." He said he was, but he was having carpal tunnel problems in his right hand so was trying to start using the mouse left handed to lessen strain on his right hand. I suggested to him that he should learn to use keyboard shortcuts and avoid using the mouse at all as much as possible. He gave me a kind of "nnnyaa, I don't really want to do that" look. What can you do? Even with a career threatening condition he still wasn't eager to consider the potential of the keyboard. It's kind of funny because he was a GUI developer so he had the ability to put in all the hot keys and get the default focus and tab indexes right to make it easy on himself.
Pulling it together with this post, and my previous posts on leveraging your IDE, and Google desktop search, there is a theme. My point is that there is a lot you can do to be more productive without working any longer or harder. Optimize your work environment to make things easier for yourself.
